Magdalena Abakanowicz turns 85

Over 100 of her sculptures are currently on display at the Venice Biennale in a show entitled "Crowd and Individual", and at an exhibition of women artists in Washington.

On 2 July, an exhibition of her gouaches opens in a Warsaw gallery.

Abakanowicz started her career, in the 1950s, with monumental gouaches in wild colours, depicting fantastic plants and creatures.

Soon she took up textile design developing her own style of three-dimensional spatial structures suspended from the gallery ceiling, which came to be called "abakans".

The artist’s international reputation was further enhanced in later years with the figurative sculptures of the 1970s, consisting of groups of headless figures standing or crouching on the ground, the "Embryology" (shown in the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1980) and a series of paintings entitled "Faces".

In the 1980s Abakanowicz started to work with traditional materials, such as bronze, stone and wood.

Magdalena Abakanowicz has had over 100 individual exhibitions and her works are in the collections of seventy museums and private galleries, including Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. (mk/rg)